The future is not yet written, but if the United States does descend into full-out armed conflict then I believe many historians will mark the beginning of the Second American Civil War on January 6, 2021 or some other date that has already passed us by.
I can see the path mentioned in the Vox article above. That the US is heading toward what the author calls “competitive authoritarianism” without a hot Civil War. It’s the FoxNews wet dream that Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson and others of his ilk are pointing their followers toward. Their fascist Budapest nirvana.
The fear among democracy experts is that the US is sleepwalking down the same path. The fear has only been intensified by the American right’s explicit embrace of Orbán, with high-profile figures like Tucker Carlson holding up the Hungarian regime as a model for America.
“That has always been my view: we’ll wake up one day and it’ll just become clear that Democrats can’t win,” says Tom Pepinsky, a political scientist at Cornell who studies democracy in Southeast Asia.
In this scenario, Democrats fail to pass any kind of electoral reform and lose control of Congress in 2022. Republicans in key states like Georgia, Arizona, North Carolina, and Wisconsin continue to rewrite the rules of elections: making it harder for Democratic-leaning communities to vote, putting partisans in charge of vote counts, and even giving GOP-controlled state legislatures the ability to override the voters and unilaterally appoint electors to the Electoral College.
.The Supreme Court continues its assault on voting rights by ruling in favor of a GOP state legislature that does just that — embracing a radical legal theory, articulated by Justice Neil Gorsuch, that state legislatures have the final say in the rules governing elections.
These measures, together with the built-in rural biases of the Senate and Electoral College, could make future control of the federal government a nearly insurmountable climb for Democrats. Democrats would still be able to hold power locally, in blue states and cities, but would have a hard time contesting national elections.
Political scientists call this kind of system “competitive authoritarianism”: one in which the opposition can win some elections and wield a limited degree of power but ultimately are prevented from governing due to a system stacked against them. Hungary is a textbook example of competitive authoritarianism in action — and, quite possibly, a glimpse into America’s future.
Sleepwalking is what the Democrats seem to be doing today.
There is plenty of sanity in the majority of Americans.
I had a Serbian colleague who had a Bosnian wife. They were married in the 80s. A decade later, their country fell apart and they fled. He was a very open-minded, thoughtful guy who loved studying history (he also told me he wasn’t a fan of living through it).
The most important point he told me was that the vast majority of Serbs and Bosnians wanted peace and understood that war would be terrible. “In my estimation, it was only about 5% of Serbs who were actually hostile and wanted war. But that’s all it takes, if they’re crazy enough and the system becomes vulnerable.”
Somehow it’s always on the Democrats.
So you’re saying we shouldn’t be fortifying Manassas? 
I guess it still wouldn’t hurt. You don’t want to be caught in a shooting war with your Manassas hanging out there.
Oh hell yeah.
About a decade ago, I was talking to my parents about this. They thought things were much scarier now. Climate change, etc. I reminded them that it seemed scarier now because we know the cold war had a happy ending. Back in the 80s, extinction before the end of the decade was a real possibility.
For sure. There was barely a sci-fi movie made that decade which didn’t depict 21st Century Earth as a barren postapocalyptic hellscape. And aside from the ever-present threat of nuclear holocaust we were watching that big hole in the ozone layer growing in real time.
I honestly wish so many people had not already given up. The more people who do that, the more likely that we’ll get a fucking second civil war.
Your Serbian friend was correct, and it’s our job to stop the 5% from dragging us down. As long as it hasn’t happened, it’s still possible to head off. But not if we all just act like it’s inevitable.
Right? We need to start pinning blame where it belongs and that’s on the GOP who is willing to become an authoritarian party and drive us to war to secure their power.
amen, sister!
i’ve been shouting this from every platform i’ve had access to for years. on 1/6/2021 i had two people call me to apologize for dismissing what i had been saying about the death cult for years. during the days immediately following that i had several people contactme by private message on facebook to tell me much the same thing. @Brainspore 's comment you quoted is a restatement of what is known as “murc’s law” in some parts of the progressive blogosphere which is there stated as “only democrats have agency in american politics.” but it comes to the same thing. democrats are always expected to “be the adults” in contests with the death cult and when the death cult finds some way to game the system in their favor, democrats are expected to forswear using the same methods. the motto of the mainstream media seems to be “in the face of republican (death cult) treachery we’ve got to both-sides the shit out of things.”
1/6 was probably more bleeding Kansas than Fort Sumter, IMHO. But yeah, open, naked violence.
The source of the anti-democratic evil is obvious enough and won’t change. It’s now fair to focus on how it triumphs.
I’ve seen the phrase “when someone shows you who they are, believe them” enough, people here believe it, a decent part of the democratic party still does not. Either they wake up, or democracy in the US is done for.
The Democratic party is very close to being classified as fascists, not because they support them directly, but because they don’t want to inconvenience themselves or their corporate sponsors. We all know what the people who didn’t agree with the nazi party but didn’t actually fight back are called.
Right now I’m seeing a combination: an Orban- or Putin-style illiberal sham democracy locking the federal/central government into effective one-party sado-populist rule by the GOP (with the Dem establishment settling for the table scraps as an even more hapless and neutered official opposition); certain states (like California) or counties or municipalities trying to resist its dictates through policy and legislation; and regions (e.g. the “State of Jefferson”) or neighbourhoods or individuals within those areas sympathetic to the central government responding with targeted blockades, sabotage of infrastructure, assassinations, bombings, etc; the central government will overtly excuse and sometimes covertly support such terrorism; it will also step in to arrest and imprison any Navalny-like figures and outlaw or hijack any organisation that poses a serious threat to its rule.
That scenario isn’t too far off from what’s happening now. It just formalises and intensifies it.
As a German, making little white kids uncomfortable about the past is something I consider an integral part of democracy and civic education.
And that’s the reason I’ve often pointed to Germany to show how a country can move forward after committing atrocities. Every student is required to learn about what happened, required to visit a place like Auschwitz, and every person in the country is denied the ‘right’ to say or do anything that shows they might want to go down that path again. It’s not sugarcoated. No one’s feelings are protected. If it makes you feel bad, that’s good. That’s exactly the lesson to learn.
I was so impressed when I visited Germany for the first time.
I’ve lived most of my life in former British colonies that have a terrible history with the original people who lived there (Canada, NZ, Australia). We are nowhere close to honestly looking at what happened, never mind preventing it from happening again.
To go from that to a place where the Holocaust happened but is not a taboo topic, where children and adults were taught exactly how this would be avoided in future, was striking and refreshing.
